Apple is dependent upon Intel at this point. The CPUs that Apple is expected to use aren't out yet, but are, IIRC, slated for a Q4 release if everything goes well. The release of the CPUs isn't an assurance that Apple will immediately refresh the Pro though, nor is the current time between refreshes (the last model was 511 days, as you may have seen in the buyer's guide). Still, I doubt we'll see them any earlier than Oct-ish, but more likely sometime in January. This is just guesswork on my part though, so don't use the above when making any important purchasing decisions. With the massive jump in performance that Sandy Bridge brought to the other models, I'm pretty excited to see what the Mac Pro refresh brings (the entry level mini I just bought for HTPC use scores a fair bit higher in Geekbench than my first gen MP, ffs!).

Sandy Bridge-EP (LGA 2011) Xeons are the processors that will most likely be in the next Mac Pro. Intel has said "Q4," but there are rumors of a delay until January 2012. Until those processors appear, there's no reason for Apple to update the Mac Pro.

JUN 19 2011∞Rumor: New Mac Pros and Minis in August Seems a few months too soon for the Mac Pro. Apple doesn't just pull new Macs out of thin air when they feel like it: they usually follow Intel's roadmap closely, especially for the Xeon-based Mac Pro.

What's happening in the Xeon line in July or August to motivate a Mac Pro update? As far as I can tell, nothing. The single-socket Xeon was recently updated to Sandy Bridge with the very good E3 line, but the dual-socket E5 line isn't due out until the fourth quarter.

So, in descending order of likelihood: either this rumor's timeline is wrong, Apple's getting very early access to the Xeon E5, or the next Mac Pro isn't offering any dual-socket models at launch.

If this is a production machine, buy what you need when you need it. You may feel stung when a new shiny drops three months later, but the gains your outfit received from a faster machine in the meantime will have been worth it.

And if you feel the gains over that short period wouldn’t be worth it… well, you have your answer, don't you?

There is still a place for the Mac Pro. We buy a few a year for when nothing else will do. Multiple internal drives, fantastic speed and ram capacity. You aren't getting four storage devices and 32 or 64 gigs of ram into any other Apple machine.

Buy the hex-core now. They are occasionally available on refurb page at Apple.com if you want to save a little money / avoid the devaluation the second you "drive it off the lot." Although currently there are only the older generation Nehalem machines available. Don't panic: it changes from week to week. In fact, for others not having a business need for a new Mac Pro, I'd wait until after the Sandy Bridge release and buy a refurb Westmere at that time when the price will drop a bit more. Unless you need thunderbolt (or unless they change the form-factor for some reason), you'll be getting a very good performer at a much lower price.

Rumor sites don't know shit about this type of product because there's no reason for Apple to leak anything. They're far better at predicting gadget launches because Apple does leak stuff on that front.

I never understood the rumors for the updated MacPros this summer when the appropriate chips from Intel aren't even out yet.

The big question is whether they just modify the existing chassis or whether they make something a little easier to put in a rack mount but that will do double duty under ones desk. There still are some places where a MacPro makes sense - although especially with TB that market keeps getting smaller.

There still are some places where a MacPro makes sense - although especially with TB that market keeps getting smaller.

Wasn't the same be said of the XServe?

Yes and no. I think Apple honestly thinks the Mini can do what the XServe did. I disagree but I think that case can be made. People who want a MacPro need support for the top of the line chips from Intel for speed - i.e. Photoshop, video, or even compilation. In fact I bet that a lot of folks within Apple have MacPros rather than MBPs just because of compilation speed. So when those new chips come out in November or whenever it'll be a big deal for a lot of people. The xServe really fit a role that I don't think Apple wanted to be in anymore. (And probably hopes iCloud will make irrelevant)

Hackintosh should be mentioned. I have a few in our lab and we won't buying any more Mac pros they've worked so well.

In a production environment?I'm all for hobbiest OS X installs but, for many working environments, the machine is secondary to the warranty and support contract.

It's clearly not for everyone but worth considering. We're a biomedical research lab and the additional configurability and grant dollars saved with Hackintosh won us over. Clearly you're not going to get AppleCare with this route so if that's important to you, a real Mac is in order.

Okay well I have been convinced to the get hex-core as soon as the funds come in

HodyOne wrote:

OSB wrote:

HodyOne wrote:

Hackintosh should be mentioned. I have a few in our lab and we won't buying any more Mac pros they've worked so well.

In a production environment?I'm all for hobbiest OS X installs but, for many working environments, the machine is secondary to the warranty and support contract.

It's clearly not for everyone but worth considering. We're a biomedical research lab and the additional configurability and grant dollars saved with Hackintosh won us over. Clearly you're not going to get AppleCare with this route so if that's important to you, a real Mac is in order.

Typically speaking for grants I thought you had to spend at least $5k on a "single stand-alone system" for it to be labeled as "equipment" and not get hit with hefty penalties? (Somewhat strange but that's the way I understand it is).

And I am the sysadmin so there is no way in hell I will be supporting a Hackintosh for our work (which I'm not even sure is strictly legal). Actually one of my friends was using a Hackintosh and recently lost all of his data -- he can't even access his Time Machine backup due to some driver issues he had I don't want to criticize your set-up (and I'm sure it's doable correctly) but that's not something I have time to spend on ATM.

If the Mac Pro is discontinued I would just buy a Dell workstation and install Linux. I would really miss Apple's a) great support from AppleCare+Genius Bar, b) Mac OS X's slick UI and c) the excellent hardware (again in terms of support and look+feel). The rest is already available on Linux but those 3 reasons are basically why I am stilling with Apple+Mac OS X for desktops and laptops (not servers) and why I'm willing to overlook Mac OS X's shortcomings in terms of package management and un-Linux-like behavior (I'm looking at you top, dseditgroup, and softwareupdate).

Typically speaking for grants I thought you had to spend at least $5k on a "single stand-alone system" for it to be labeled as "equipment" and not get hit with hefty penalties? (Somewhat strange but that's the way I understand it is).

Not for NIH grants, at least not that our grants office is aware of.

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And I am the sysadmin so there is no way in hell I will be supporting a Hackintosh for our work (which I'm not even sure is strictly legal).

If it doesn't work for you my feelings won't be hurt. For us, support for the hackintoshes has been about the same as for a regular mac. We are more careful during software updates but we're pretty careful about those for real macs too. The upside outweighs that.

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Actually one of my friends was using a Hackintosh and recently lost all of his data -- he can't even access his Time Machine backup due to some driver issues he had I don't want to criticize your set-up (and I'm sure it's doable correctly) but that's not something I have time to spend on ATM.

1) your friend had a ridiculously inadequate backup strategy 2) Time machine backups don't always work even on Apple macs.

Typically speaking for grants I thought you had to spend at least $5k on a "single stand-alone system" for it to be labeled as "equipment" and not get hit with hefty penalties? (Somewhat strange but that's the way I understand it is).

Not for NIH grants, at least not that our grants office is aware of.

Gotcha, I am thinking NSF (I think) so it could be different.

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And I am the sysadmin so there is no way in hell I will be supporting a Hackintosh for our work (which I'm not even sure is strictly legal).

If it doesn't work for you my feelings won't be hurt. For us, support for the hackintoshes has been about the same as for a regular mac. We are more careful during software updates but we're pretty careful about those for real macs too. The upside outweighs that.

Good point and I didn't mean to hurt your feelings -- more power to you, in fact. The updates for regular Mac OS X are even not for the faint-hearted (as I understand if you have a power-outage during a software update you might just brick your system).

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Actually one of my friends was using a Hackintosh and recently lost all of his data -- he can't even access his Time Machine backup due to some driver issues he had I don't want to criticize your set-up (and I'm sure it's doable correctly) but that's not something I have time to spend on ATM.

1) your friend had a ridiculously inadequate backup strategy 2) Time machine backups don't always work even on Apple macs.

Yeah Time machine is far from perfect. I basically use SVN/cloud for my critical files but Time machine saved me tons of time when my hard-drive failed to get back up and running with all my applications!

And I think it's great that you have got it to work and that Hackintosh is working well. I would *love* to see Hackintosh aka Mac OS X work perfectly on more systems.

Typically speaking for grants I thought you had to spend at least $5k on a "single stand-alone system" for it to be labeled as "equipment" and not get hit with hefty penalties? (Somewhat strange but that's the way I understand it is).

Not for NIH grants, at least not that our grants office is aware of.

Gotcha, I am thinking NSF (I think) so it could be different.

Virtually all federal RFPs will include a section says that supplies are under $5K and "equipment" is over, as we discuss in this blog post. AFAIK this is true for the NIH as well, although perhaps they have some kind of different word for it.

With our clients, we strongly discourage "equipment" purchases because they trigger a raft of federal purchasing rules.

1. NIH pretty much lets you do what you think best with the grant money these days as long as institution approves2. those drive slots are used for more than just the extra capacity (RAID, backup, disk swapping.....)3. where, oh where is my new Mac Pro?? have been waiting a long time but current one is still doing fine

the 16xx should turbo near, or above, 4 GHz and bring some of "teh snappy" to photoshop

Xeon E5-1620 is a quad-core chip with 3.6 GHz clock speed and 10 MB L3 cache. Two other Xeons, E5-1650 and E5-1660, feature 6 CPU cores, although their clock frequencies are lower than on the E5-1620. The E5-1650 SKU runs at 3.2 GHz, and has 12 MB level 3 cache. The Intel E5-1660 has 3.3 GHz stock frequency and 15 MB last level cache.Looking at the specifications, you may notice that they resemble very closely the specs of i7-3xxx extreme processors with Sandy Bridge-E core. Like the i7-3xxx CPUs, Xeon E5-1600 products incorporate all standard and advanced Sandy Bridge features, including Hyper-Threading, Turbo Boost, Trusted Execution, VT-c/d/x, as well as AES and AVX instructions. The E5 chips integrate quad-channel memory controller, and support DDR3 memory with data rates up to 1600 MHz.

Admittedly I'm not really up on my funding rules and regulations, but it's my understanding that bumping things into the "equipment" category is a great way to keep your organization from taking 30-40% of your grant money for "overhead."

Admittedly I'm not really up on my funding rules and regulations, but it's my understanding that bumping things into the "equipment" category is a great way to keep your organization from taking 30-40% of your grant money for "overhead."

That's correct. It's the overhead that is the issue (and I think it's more like 50% in our case).

In lots of corporate purchasing systems an expenditure for a single item larger than $X will trigger a requirement for at least Y competitive bids, administered by a purchasing person with absolutely no knowledge of what they are buying for whom or why, or why some of the written specs might be more important than others.

A poorly written specification by the requisitioner has a high likelihood of resulting in a very affordable toaster or washing machine being purchased in place of the desired Mac Pro.

I had been considering a 27" i7 iMac because my Core2Duo 24" iMac is seriously starting to bog down with Lightroom and music apps. The upgradability of the MP would be very tempting if the price were right. Long-term it would be more cost-effective and easier to troubleshoot if I could install my own SSDs as they come down in price, and being able to have a matte screen again as my primary monitor would also be lovely. Apple's upgrade pricing history shows how rarely they make big changes in prices on model tiers, so the base level machine would probably remain close to the current $2500 price-point, which is close to the total cost of the tricked-out iMac with 3rd-party 16Gb RAM I have been thinking about.

If Apple made a physically smaller base Mac Pro that only had 1-2 PCIe slots (and could therefore accommodate a cheaper and wimpier power supply) and priced it at $1999 I bet it would grow sales with a lot of power home users while preserving its current market for users of heavy iron. Wishful thinking though. Apple really prefers selling closed boxes these days.

Given the increasingly lengthy waits between Mac Pro refreshes, if a new Mac Pro will be out later this year you can probably kiss goodbye the idea of another Mac Pro using Ivy Bridge (which supposedly would offer a 20% increase in speed); we'd have to wait for Haswell in 2013 before another upgrade/ It'd probably be this or nothing for another 18 months....

Given the increasingly lengthy waits between Mac Pro refreshes, if a new Mac Pro will be out later this year you can probably kiss goodbye the idea of another Mac Pro using Ivy Bridge (which supposedly would offer a 20% increase in speed); we'd have to wait for Haswell in 2013 before another upgrade/ It'd probably be this or nothing for another 18 months....

Apple's Mac Pro release schedule is entirely determined by when Intel releases Mac Pro-appropriate CPUs. Like Sandy Bridge-E, Ivy Bridge-E will likely come out well after mainstream Ivy Bridge. It will probably be the "Late 2012" Mac Pro.

Apple's Mac Pro release schedule is entirely determined by when Intel releases Mac Pro-appropriate CPUs. Like Sandy Bridge-E, Ivy Bridge-E will likely come out well after mainstream Ivy Bridge. It will probably be the "Late 2012" Mac Pro.

aka the 2013 Mac Pro

What disappoints me is Apple's disinclination to really target the low-end workstation market in favor of offering $3k+ boxes. As someone running an iMac with a half-dozen drives sitting on his desk (externals, drive dock, backup bare drives) I would really enjoy shoving bare drives into a fast minitower, but Apple's choices and prices and price-performance for my pro/consumer needs (photo, music, storage) don't line up well.

I really wonder what Apple plans to do now that they've killed the Xserve and waited so long to refresh the Mac Pros. Will the new MP be more flexible and be rackmountable http://www.9to5mac.com/63107/prototype-next-gen-mac-pro-detailed-redesigned-rackable-stackable/? Will they add an affordable minitower with fewer slots? (My pipe dream.) Or are they merely happy to plow the lucrative and successful consumer channel while only offering expensive (5+ year-old box design) models to customers who have to get a large, relatively expensive tower because Apple has no smaller, more affordable alternatives for them?

I unfortunately agree with The Professor. The market is rapidly moving from physical storage to cloud-storage. So the mini-tower is on its way out. Is this a good thing? Absolutely not. People in general don't actually know what's best for them. Your own physical media will always be faster, cheaper, and you will always have more control than going to a cloud-service. Do people care? It doesn't seem so.

Not disagreeing at all, but I used to own a PowerMac G4 'Quicksilver' and it just grates on me that Apple killed off any kind of decent $1600 minitower.

If Apple were inclined to sell affordable workstation desktops the best way for them to cut costs would be to come out with a smaller, more limited tower with fewer PCI card slots and a smaller power supply - a half-pint tower. Yes, even though the market is quickly moving away from towers they're still a small and profitable niche, especially for businesses. And fewer customized and miniaturized parts leads to higher margins and/or lower selling prices. That's why you can get a bare-bones Dell (yeah yeah, I know) tower with a dual-core Xeon W3503 starting at $1300, or dual quad-core Xeon E5606 starting at $2800. Or less, depending on what coupons or sales are going 'round.

Yet having killed off the Xserve, I suspect that you're both right and that instead Apple is going the other way: relatively expensive, stackable Mac Pros that can double as servers.

excerptThough Sandy Bridge-E promises notable gains in the server world, it’s destined to be less influential on the desktop, if only because the number of folks willing to pay a steep premium for two additional cores and an otherwise-similar platform is small. Sandy Bridge spoiled us, so a high-end part just doesn't have the impact on enthusiasts that Bloomfield had back in 2008.